The Ghosts of Mississippi (43 page)

In October 1969 Beckwith was a traveling boat salesman. He was introduced to Davis by a mutual acquaintance, and they met once for supper at a Lum’s restaurant. The conversation was not just about boats.

“We discussed his arrest and his trials,” Davis said. “He never admitted to me that he was guilty. He never denied it, which I thought was a little strange.”

The defense lawyers objected. Davis was allowed to continue.

Davis said Beckwith had told him that “selective killings” were necessary to the right-wing cause. “He said he never asked someone else to do something he would not do himself,” Davis testified.

Peggy Morgan, the witness who rode with Beckwith to Parchman penitentiary was up next. She wore a pink suit and pink stiletto heels and had frosted blond hair. Her thin face seemed pinched beneath large dark glasses. She spoke haltingly, like a woman who knew the consequences of talking too loud.

She told the court that she had lived in Greenwood with her now-estranged husband, Lloyd, back in the sixties. One afternoon she and Lloyd had driven up to Parchman to visit Lloyd’s brother in prison. They’d offered a ride to Beckwith. (The judge would not let her say that Beckwith was going to see Cecil Sessums, who was doing time for the murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer.)

Morgan sat between her husband and Beckwith in the cab of the pickup. During the eighty-mile drive Beckwith made conversation.

“He started talking about some bombings,” she recalled. “He said that he had killed Medgar Evers, a nigger, and he wasn’t scared to kill again.”

Kitchens challenged her credibility in his cross-examination. He used his smoothest voice to try to grind her into confetti on the stand. She was a vulnerable target. She couldn’t remember exactly when the conversation with Beckwith had taken place, not even the year it had happened. Kitchens dragged out her troubled family history, things she had told him during their pretrial interview. She had accused her father of abusing her, and he had later been murdered. Her mother had frozen to death. She’d suffered from an anxiety disorder for which she was treated with medication.

Peggy Morgan meekly conceded all these things. Kitchens’s treatment of her only made her seem more sympathetic and  more honest.

DeLaughter gently took over in redirect. “Tell the jury whether any other traumatic thing happened before,” he said.

“He [Beckwith] told me that this better not never get out,” she said.

“What effect did this have on you?”

“It made me fear not to say anything.”

She said that she had contacted the D.A.’s office after she heard the case had been reopened because “there was evidence that should be brought forward.” She had no interest in becoming a witness at this trial.

She was encouraged to tell the jury that she was still married to Lloyd Morgan, but he was now a drifter and she didn’t know where he was. He had contacted her recently, though, after he’d found out she had talked to the D.A.’s office.

“He said I better not come here and testify,” she said in a soft, calm voice. “I would wind up dead.”

Later, after the court broke for lunch, the press ambushed Peggy Morgan in the hallway. She gave in to their questions and talked for the TV cameras. She had something she wanted to say. “I want Myrlie Evers to know that I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t come forward sooner.”

After so much emotional testimony the long-awaited appearance of Delmar Dennis was somehow anticlimactic. Dennis surprised Crisco by showing up for court in a casual white pullover and slacks instead of a business suit. He wore his wire-rimmed glasses and a full beard.

His appearance in court lent a historical perspective to the case, to tying it to another one of Mississippi’s notorious crimes; the Neshoba County murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.

Dennis briefly told the story of his days in the White Knights, how he had been a titan responsible for ten Mississippi counties and had reported everything to the FBI. For his trouble, he said, he got one hundred dollars per week expense money. In his flat, nasal drawl Dennis told the jury about the meeting near the swinging bridge back in August 1965, when he had heard Beckwith talk about murder. “He was admonishing the Klan to kill the enemy, from the top on down,” Dennis said.

Dennis had been telling reporters that for years. Then he came to the part about Evers. Dennis reported that Beckwith had said, “Killing that nigger did me no more physical harm than your wives have to have when they’re having a baby for you.”

A dozen heads shot up in the press section, and DeLaughter paused to look at Dennis for a moment. What happened to the part about “inner discomfort”? Was this quote, one that Dennis had repeated in exactly the same way again and again to anyone who’d asked him, only a paraphrase of what Beckwith had supposedly said? The jury, of course, wouldn’t know that. This new quote did, however, sound just like what Beckwith had said to Prince.

Naturally Kitchens asked Dennis why he changed his quote, and Dennis just said that he’d remembered it as best he could. He hadn’t recorded the speech, and he admitted that he had never seen the quote written down in any FBI report, although he had told it to an agent. Kitchens tried to make it seem as if Dennis was just saying these things to sell his books.

The prosecution then called another unexpected witness to stamp Delmar’s testimony with the U.S. government seal of approval. Tom Van Riper had been one of Dennis’s FBI handlers. DeLaughter and Crisco hadn’t known he even existed until they’d seen him quoted in Massengill’s book.

Van Riper was able to do what no one had done before: corroborate that Dennis said he had heard Beckwith brag about “killing that nigger.” Dennis had, indeed, reported it to him, and they had discussed Beckwith.

Van Riper’s testimony cleared up some nagging questions about Dennis’s new evidence against Beckwith. In 1965 the Evers case had still been very much open. Why hadn’t the FBI passed on this admission to the Hinds County district attorney?

Dennis, said Van Riper, had been the government’s most important witness in the case code-named MIBURN, or Mississippi Burning, the one that was used to break the back of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

“That was the most important thing going at the time,” the retired agent said. “The FBI would never have blown an informant as important” as Delmar Dennis. The unspoken coda to that statement lingered in the air: the FBI wouldn’t have blown him on a state trial for the killing of a black leader, one that would probably not have ended in a conviction.

Van Riper said that he had written down Dennis’s statements and passed them on to his FBI superior, Inspector Joe Sullivan. He assumed they were filed away.

On cross-examination Van Riper admitted that he had no idea what had become of those notes. No one had seen them in more than twenty-five years.

Kitchens and Coxwell fought hard to keep the next witness off the stand. So far the prosecution had produced a motley array of witnesses who had told the jury that Beckwith had bragged to them about killing, but none of them was unimpeachable. There were two FBI informants, one a former Klansman; a woman on Xanax; an alcoholic ex-con; and a bookkeeper who had changed her story.

Mark Reiley had no negatives. The man who had called the district attorney from Chicago in the middle of the trial seemed to be a stable, upstanding citizen. This surprise witness, who had once been a prison guard in Louisiana, had nothing to gain from his testimony against Beckwith.

Kitchens implored the judge to bar his testimony as inherently prejudicial, since it would mean telling the jury that Beckwith had been in prison. Barring that, he asked for a continuance to investigate Reiley’s story. Judge Hilburn thought about it, then denied the defense motions. He said that the court could not “orchestrate” the creation of evidence just because it might put one side or the other at a disadvantage. He said he would allow the witness to testify as long as he didn’t get into the reason Beckwith had been in prison.

Reiley was a big, red-headed Irishman with a trim mustache, aviator glasses, and a colorful tie. His years in Chicago had flattened out his Louisiana accent, but the southern inflections crept back into his voice as he spun his story for the jury.

He told them that he had decided to call the district attorney on Friday afternoon after watching a newscast about the trial. He told them that he had recognized Beckwith’s face on TV and he remembered that when he was a prison guard in Louisiana in 1979, Beckwith had said that he had killed Medgar Evers. It wasn’t until Friday that Reiley found out who Evers was.

Ed Peters, who was better at extracting emotional testimony from a witness, handled the direct examination. He urged Reiley to begin at the beginning. Reiley said he came from an abusive, broken home and had been raised by his grandparents. His grandfather had died when he was fourteen, leaving an aching gap in his life.

He had been twenty-one years old, working as a guard in a locked hospital ward for convicts at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, when he met Beckwith. “He seemed to give me a lot of attention,” Reiley said. “He knew I was lacking a father-type figure.”

Beckwith called Reiley “Youngblood” and had sat with him for eight to twelve hours a day, talking to him and indoctrinating him in his peculiar brand of religion.

“What did he tell you about black people?” Peters asked.

“Black people were beasts of the field, like animals or fishes. Pale white people were the chosen people to rule over beasts of the field.” If they “got out of line,” Beckwith had told Reiley, you could “kill them and not feel guilty about it.”

The young guard began to lose his faith in Beckwith after he overheard an argument between the prisoner and a black nurse whom he wouldn’t allow to touch him. Beckwith called her a nigger. She wouldn’t take that talk from him, and soon both of them were screaming. That was when he heard Beckwith shout, “If I could get rid of an uppity nigger like Medgar Evers, I would have no problem with a no-account nigger like you!”

Peters asked whether Beckwith had said anything else about Evers. The young man replied that Beckwith had wanted to impress him with his power and influence in Mississippi. He’d bragged that if he was lying about his status, he would be serving time “for getting rid of that nigger Medgar Evers.”

Soon Reiley had started questioning Beckwith’s teachings, which enraged Beckwith. When Reiley told him he wasn’t going to join his racist organization, Beckwith told him “he knew all along I was a communist nigger-loving bastard.” That was the last time they had spoken.

Peters asked Reiley whether he had been pressured or paid in any way for his testimony. Reiley said that he hadn’t.

In fact all he’d gotten was a plane ride from Chicago and a sandwich for lunch?

“I was lucky for that sandwich,” Reiley said quite seriously. There were a few chuckles in the courtroom.

Jim Kitchens couldn’t score any points off this witness, and he quickly released him from cross-examination.

It wasn’t going to get any better than this. Peters and DeLaughter made a quick decision.

“The State rests,” Ed Peters announced.

On Wednesday morning February 2, the defense opened with another demand for a mistrial or a directed verdict of not guilty. Coxwell mentioned the denial of due process and a speedy trial. He also noted the unfairness of the jury selection process, because the change of venue had discouraged old people from sitting on the jury. Coxwell offered a long list of points in the prosecution’s case that he considered unfair to his client, including the fact that the defense had not been given an opportunity to check out Mark Reiley’s story. By now Coxwell knew the motion was futile, but it had to go on the record.

Even though spectators had to answer a list of personal questions to get a visitor’s pass, then walk through a metal detector and sometimes submit to frisks and handbag searches from unfriendly deputies, more and more of them showed up every day. By now the pews were nearly packed.

Myrlie Evers’s coterie continued to grow. Her side of the aisle was the place to see and be seen for movers and shakers in the black community. Congressman Bennie Thompson dropped in. Bea Branch, the new state president of the NAACP, was there, as was William Gibson, chairman of the national NAACP board. Minister Charles X Quinn, local leader of the Nation of Islam, showed up, as did Sam Baily and other old NAACP stalwarts who had been waiting for this day for a long time.

Beckwith’s corner was drawing a diverse crowd of relatives and radicals. Today the second row was packed with burly skinheads brought in by Richard Barrett, Jackson’s resident neo-Nazi. They sat quietly, arms folded, watching the proceedings. Benny Bennett moved himself into their line of vision and stared at them while he squeezed his wad of putty, a look of grim imagination on his face.

After Judge Hilburn overruled Coxwell’s motion, the jury filed in, and the defense of Beckwith got under way. From the beginning Coxwell and Kitchens had refused to concede that the transcripts from the first trial were an authentic and accurate record. They had fought hard to keep the prosecution from reading the testimony of sick or dead witnesses at this trial. This stance, however, did not prevent Merrida Coxwell from announcing that his first witness would be Roy Jones, a dead man, and that his testimony would be read from the transcript.

A private investigator played the part of Jones. Within a few minutes the first of Beckwith’s alibi witnesses had told his tale from the grave. Jones, an auxiliary police officer, had sworn that he had seen Beckwith sitting in his white Valiant near the Billups filling station in Greenwood at 11:45 p.m. on the night of June 11, 1963.

Bobby read the cross-examination, selecting specific excerpts from the text to make the point that Jones had testified that the night was pitch dark (according to several earlier witnesses, there had been a bright moon) and that Jones couldn’t remember seeing Beckwith any other night that month.

Even though Hollis Cresswell was still alive, Coxwell asked to have his testimony read because the man was in his eighties and in poor health. Ed Peters fought hard to prevent it. He held in his hand a list of eighteen of Cresswell’s self-contradictions during his grand jury testimony back in 1990. He was ready to chew the man up in cross- examination. He had to. The alibi witnesses were the biggest problem he faced. If they were believable, he could wind up with another hung jury.

Judge Hilburn allowed Cresswell’s testimony to be read. It was the first major blow to the prosecution in a trial that had, so far, been going its way.

Cresswell’s testimony was read with feeling, but the jurors didn’t seem particularly riveted by the performance. Some jurors actually covered their eyes with their hands.

The veteran Greenwood police lieutenant had sworn that he had seen Beckwith at 1:05 on the morning of June 12, 1963. Beckwith was having his car gassed up at a Shell station in Greenwood. The testimony touched on the details designed to make the story believable: Cresswell knew the time because he and his partner were about to eat a sandwich before a certain store closed; he had heard about Evers’s murder on the radio later that morning.

Peters, in his cross-examination, restricted to the written text, made the point that Cresswell had not told his story to the Jackson police or D.A.’s office after Beckwith’s arrest, even though the man had sat in jail for eight months.

At 10:30 Wednesday the first live defense witness was sworn in. James Holley was sixty-five now, overweight with a perfectly round, pink head covered with the translucent gray stubble of a military crew cut. When he raised his hand to take the oath, a roll of fat heaved over the collar of his tight maroon sports coat. He looked like a redneck cop from central casting, a young black male’s worst nightmare. There were several young black males on the jury, and they eyed him soberly.

Holley seemed relaxed and jovial. He leaned back confidently in the witness chair as Coxwell led him back to a hot June night in 1963. He had been a young patrolman back then, riding with Hollis Cresswell on the graveyard shift.

He allowed that he could recognize Beckwith but didn’t know him well and didn’t remember how he had met him. Coxwell asked whether they had belonged to the same clubs or church or whether they had visited each other’s homes. The answer was no.

Holley told the same story as Cresswell, that they had seen Beckwith at 1:05 a.m., a half hour after the shooting, outside a Greenwood filling station more than ninety miles from Jackson. Ten days later, when Beckwith was arrested for Evers’s murder, Holley said he had “put two and two together.”

“I knowed we saw him that morning and later that morning heard the man had been shot,” he said.

Holley could remember the time he had seen Beckwith, he said, because “we always got a sandwich between one and one-thirty” at Bracci Danton’s store and the store closed at 1:30 a.m.

The retired cop described how he had seen Beckwith standing in the lit parking lot of the Shell station while an attendant put gas in his car.

“After you saw Mr. Beckwith, what did you do then?” Coxwell asked.

“When we left, after we saw him gassing up, we went to the grocery store and got a sandwich.”

Everyone seemed grateful when the judge called a two-hour lunch break.

At 1:45 that afternoon Ed Peters stood up to begin his cross-examination. As usual he began with a seemingly innocent question: how long had Beckwith and Holley been friends?

Holley was in an even brighter mood after his meal. He was loose and grinning. “Delay’s been my friend ever since I’ve known him,” he said. “Shortly after World War Two.”

Peters had found an opening, and he was about to pop Holley like a boiled peanut.

Is that why he called him “Dee-lay,” Peters asked. Didn’t he say Beckwith wasn’t his friend?

Holley was still smiling but not so hard. “Sure, he was my friend. Just like I hope you’re my friend,” he said.

Peters assured him that they were not friends.

Holley’s face changed. He started working his hands together, fiddling with his tie. From now on Peters referred to the defendant as “your good buddy Dee-lay,” until Kitchens objected and the judge stopped him.

Since Beckwith was his friend, Peters wanted to know whether Holley knew his views on segregation.

“He’s outspoken,” Holley said. “He speaks his mind. I’ve never heard him make a derogatory remark about anybody. I don’t know if he’s a segregationist. You’d have to ask him.”

Peters stopped for a moment to let that sink in.

“Did you believe strongly in segregation in 1963?” Peters asked.

“Yessir,” Holley said.

“Is that why you came here?”

“Nossir.”

Peters kept the man on the stand for two more hours, picking apart every detail of his story. He got him to admit that Beckwith was more than just a casual acquaintance. He found discrepancies in Holley’s often-repeated version of events, such as the fact that the patrolmen hadn’t gotten a sandwich right after they’d said they’d seen Beckwith; they had patrolled uptown for a while. Peters got Holley to admit that he and Hollis Cresswell had “talked over” their story before testifying.

Peters seemed incredulous that Holley could have seen Beckwith standing with his leg up on the curb from the angle he described. The Valiant and the gas pump would have been in the way.

“Did you see through the car?” Peters demanded, almost yelling. “Over it? Under it?” Holley’s big jaw jutted out, and he was getting flustered.

Peters hammered him the hardest over the fact that he had never told his story to any law officers until Beckwith’s first trial.

“Did you ever go to the police department and tell them what was going on?” Peters asked.

“No.”

“Did you ever go to the FBI and tell them what was going on?”

“No.”

“You let your buddy Delay stay in jail all that time and never told a single person investigating the case, ‘Hey! You’ve got the wrong guy!’?”

“No police officer ever asked me.”

By the time it was over, even some members of the press corps were starting to feel sorry for Holley. It seemed like Ed Peters was kicking a corpse.

It was nearly four o’clock when Peters asked his last question: “Think you and I are still friends?”

Kitchens leaped up to demand a mistrial, but the judge waved him down.

In his redirect Kitchens asked Holley whether he would lie for Beckwith or whether Beckwith had asked him to lie for him. “Nossir,” he said to both questions.

Kitchens tried to soften Holley’s image with the jury by asking him about his neighbors in Greenwood, who were mostly black. “And we don’t have any problems whatsoever,” Holley said. For whatever reason Kitchens did not bring up the fact that Holley had been elected to Greenwood’s city council, representing a predominantly black district.

After a long and disheartening day, Holley was allowed to go home.

The defense next called John Book, who also had testified in 1964. He had been a senior employee with Delta Liquid Plant Food, and he had spent the day of June 10, 1963, driving around the Delta with Beckwith, testing soil samples from cotton farms. He’d noticed a wound on Beckwith’s forehead.

“What kind of a wound?” Coxwell asked.

“A circular, half-moon cut over his eye.”

Peters and DeLaughter had already decided that they weren’t going to try to prove that the cut over Beckwith’s eye had been made the night of the murder. It was good enough to show that he had been firing a rifle, sighting it perhaps, looking down the scope when it kicked and cut him. Peters managed to turn Book’s testimony to his advantage.

Did Book remember whether Beckwith had said anything about segregation during that drive? Book didn’t recall.

“Do you remember telling the police that you…” Peters read from the police report, “…‘had a hard time keeping Delay’s mind on the job because he was talking about segregation?’ ”

Yes, now Book remembered.

Crowds lined up to get into the courtroom on Thursday morning as word percolated through town that this was the day that Beckwith would take the stand. Thelma entered the courthouse on her husband’s arm, wearing her flamingo-pink cape and sporting large, dark safety glasses to protect her eyes from the camera lights. Beckwith had chosen his maraschino-cherry-red blazer for the occasion. People wondered out loud whether his lawyers had picked his outfit to show the jury what a crazy old coot he was. He looked more like a retired carnival barker than a fearsome assassin. But for all his flaming menswear, Beckwith seemed glum and distracted.

The stress was showing on his family as well. Little Delay was snappish. He clumped down the hallways in his reptile-skin boots, toting a box of files, glowering and sometimes yelling at photographers to get out of his way. Thelma wandered about the courtroom until a friend led her back to her seat.

The case was clearly not going well for Byron De La Beckwith. It had not turned into a forum for his twisted beliefs, a platform on which to anoint him as patron saint of the last Confederate holdouts. The case was instead shaping up to be what DeLaughter had said it would be: a murder trial.

The day began with a calamitous setback for the defense. Coxwell had planned to call James Hobby, who had been a surprise witness at the second trial in April 1964. Hobby, who was a truck driver in Jackson at the time of the murder, was going to tell the jury that he drove a Valiant just like Beckwith’s and that he had been at Joe’s Drive In on the night of the murder.

His story was even more detailed thirty years later and was in some ways inconsistent with newspaper accounts of his earlier testimony. According to the defense, he was now prepared to say that he’d had a big antenna on his Valiant because he was a CB radio buff. He also was going to say that he was a regular customer at Joe’s and that he had been there at closing time when a fight had erupted outside. He was going to say that he knew Barbara Holder and insist that he hadn’t seen her there. He also remembered hearing the sound of the rifle while he was leaving the restaurant.

Hobby was a treasured witness for the defense. He was an oracle of reasonable doubt, someone who could smash every theory the prosecution had developed to tie Beckwith to the crime scene. There was only one problem: Coxwell had never notified the prosecutors — in writing — that he intended to call Hobby. In the heated arguments before the judge that morning, DeLaughter maintained that he had never heard Hobby’s name until after the trial had started. Coxwell insisted that he had told him, orally, that Hobby was a potential witness.

Judge Hilburn had a serious dilemma here, with two prominent lawyers, friends, basically calling each other a liar in his court. He announced that he had to go with the strict interpretation of the law. Written notification was the rule. He denied the witness.

By now Coxwell was trying the case for the appeal. He knew that he could turn the trial into a free-for-all, could drive a whole garbage truck of dirt into the courtroom and dump it in front of the jury. He could rake up the FBI reports and set up all the other scenarios and other suspects — the mystery man from Shreveport at the bus station, the three men in the hotel room with the rifle, the blue pickup with the rifle in the gun rack that had been noted hanging around at a demonstration and was seen at Joe’s Drive In the day of the murder. He could try all sorts of stunts, such as subpoenaing Beckwith’s Klan friend Gordon Lackey, who had been tall, young, and dark-haired at the time, and asking him what he had been doing the night of June 11. But any of those things would just open up opportunities for Peters to bring up other FBI reports about Beckwith’s political activities and suspicious associations. It would confuse the hell out of the jury, but it might end up putting his client in an even worse position, if that was possible.